How Do You Work With Long Breakbeats?

Tips & Tricks
1

to those who use breakbeats in their song (probably no one): what’s your workflow on chopping breaks with renoise? speaking of longer breakbeats which are longer than 8 bars. i’m currently experiencing huge problems with that.

this is how i work: i chop the breaks using the 09XX and after that i save them in a clean template as an own file. when i want to do a song with them then i load them up and i leave the template right at the beginning of the song so i can always come up to them. this is the idea at least.

problem is: it takes ass long to get the chopping done. problem number 1 is that if you want to create beats by copypasting from the template you always have to scroll up and down, search an appropriate spot in the break, but you might don’t know what the offset numbers means, SO you have to relisten the break from beginning. here it would be nice to have a “Playback Selected Area” feature, but there isn’t. then you need to select it, copy it, scroll down again. and at one point this whole scrolling and copypasting is driving me crazy!!

problem number 2 is, if i don’t want to scroll i have to write the offset number by myself, which means i have to go to sampler, relisten the break, zoom in to find the appropriate number, go back to pattern editor, typing in the offset number, relisten, … and so on.

so far i never had problems with this because i used the amen break which i chopped it to it bits and they weren’t that much and i directly placed them in the pattern editor. but long breaks, for example alligator boogaloo (which is still one of the shorter ones) are a real pain. ooh, i’m really jealous of piano roll right now, you can’t believe that :(

how do you work in cases like this? it’s really getting me down and i need some advice.

2

playback selected area = the enter button my friend, and the middle mouse button will play from where you click it in the sample editor.(but will cutoff at end of screen.) a

theres a few videos on youtube for quick ways to beatslice, one method i learnt from them is to highlight the entire sample from the right end all the way left, leaving the furthest left drum hit(usually a kick in breaks) not selected. you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in to the best spot while still holding the left mouse button. once your left with just th first hit “un-selected”, nice and tidy, press “cntl-x” to cut the rest of the sample to the clipboard. then right click the sample slot area (im presuming the break was originally in slot 1) and select “insert new sample”. then with the new sampleslot created press “cntrl-v” to paste the rest of the remaing break in to it. just keep doing the same thing till youve gone through the whole break, youl be quite surprised how quick you can get through breaks and other samples once you get the hang of it.

maybe someone else knows where the video i learnt this from is??

3

it doesn’t work. it actually playes from where the center is (forgot the name) at any place but it playbacks off bpm and not the selected area!!

yes, i have known this already, but as i said, it’s about long breakbeats i’m talking about. you don’t want to have 200+ instruments of breakbeat slices using this method…

4

what about freecycle in linux?? or ableton lives warp function?
sorry, wasnt much help then.
http://freecycle.redsteamrecords.com/

5

I use breaks a lot. I love using them, but you have to pick your method depending on the situation in front of you.

If the timing is sharp I’ll stick with the classic 9XX method, and get the bpm sync as close as I can manually with sample pitch tuning. Loop sync is good, but ultimately I turn it off and fine tune the speed so I can use pattern fx code like pitching (1XX and 2XX).

For long breaks you could use the above method, and manually divide the recording into halves, quarters, eighths etc.

For breaks that aren’t so tight in timing (but I still want to use them because of textural reasons) the best and only way is to manually cut it up into separate samples. Yes this is a lot of work, but it’s worth it because you get super precise with the control of the sound, and you can start to play with weird loop points and envelopes for each sound. Anything decent requires work and a lot of time to make it happen. Enjoy the craft. :)

6

Personally i handle long samples in energy-xt but if i want to keep it renoise only project, this is good option as well.

7

I sadistically mutilate and torture my breaks :wacko: The little bastards deserve it :dribble:

8

whether you can sync a break to the bpm depends on the break of course. apache and amen sound nice even at dnb speed, but that doesn’t work for all breaks unfortunately.
cut into separate samples. well that’s an idea, but as i said, for long and complicated breaks it’s not convenient at all. but for simple breaks like the amen, soul beat runna, humpty dump, etc it’s nice.

9

Personally I usually just break a larger break into several measures and then trigger those with 09xx as follows:

(1) Load the break into an instrument and beat match it as closely as possible (adjust the instrument pitch).

(2) Select all and copy the sample into a new sample slot.

(3) In the NEW slot (I have accidentally forgotten this several times) erase all but the first measure. If you’re really slick, don’t erase it, rather cut it and save it for the next step… I’m never precise enough for this, though.

(4) Create yet another sample slot and paste the cut sample from the previous step. Or if you’re me and weren’t precise enough with the cut, just copy and paste the whole sample from the first slot into this new one and delete the first measure.

(5) Delete/cut all but the first (actually second) measure.

(6) Keep on going measure by measure until you’re done, at which point you go and erase your original, complete sample (first slot).

(7) In the instrument editor (is that the name?) automatically map the samples as a drum kit.

(8) Apply the pitch changes you made to the original sample to match the beat to all the samples. Note that the root note will be different.

Now I have single measure break beat bits which makes my 09xx more precise. You just have to select the right note to trigger along with the offset command. So to play the second hit of the second measure, your line might read something like: C#04-04 – -- – 0917

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it seems like an interesting source of randomness to apply the same pattern to different samples (measures) from the breakbeat instrument we created by just changing the note from, say, C to C# or whatever.

The only problem I have with this method so far is that long samples seem to change tempo slightly from measure to measure. So sometimes I change the root pitch slightly of each measure (each sample slot) individually and you can barely notice it or, if you do, it might even add interest.

If you need specifics as to where in the interface these things are, we will have to wait until I get home.

10

I don’t really use long breaks that often but when I’m working with an Amen, I highlight each hit then ‘copy into new sample’ (ctrl+shift+C) this adds them to the lower half of the instrument panel in the top right, I then group all the hats, snares, kicks etc., together and name them then hit ‘generate drum kit’ in the instrument editor tab. If you’re unaware what this does it assigns each of the smaller samples you copied to a different key working from middle C, this works on an external keyboard and your QWERTY. It takes time to get through all that but it makes the work flow much faster afterwards and ultimately saves time, don’t need to remember which 09xx command is which snare etc., and can easily swap out different hits to try different sounds.

11

I would concur that manually chopping them up and turning them into an .xrni is the way forward in this regard. :walkman:

12

what is an xrni? :mellow:

13

Renoise Instrument.

14

yeah, to elaborate on the above answer…you know those instruments that Renoise comes with?

ChipSaw, ChipSquare, 909 kit etc… those are .xrni: basically a collection of samples or one sample turned into an instrument.

I basically have most of my favorite sounds: drums, synths, weird fx, chopped up breaks as .xrni :walkman:

15

Your 2 problems are no problems, this is 95% daily grind of a producer. Composing music + learning it isnt quite a easy job all the time. But this is also the fact which makes it interesting to learn.

A vice versa solution would be to avoid using drumloops, instead creating your own drums, at least avoid using long breakbeats-drumloops, instead creating your own breaktbeat using just a 16steps long drumloop.

16

@Tarek-FM: i see, thank you :)

no it’s not. a producer that uses the piano roll has easier play creatin beats due to immediate access to trigger beats. my workflow is oftenly obstructed… have you actually read my first post?

come on people, really, my problem is not about how to slice up all breaks and stuff, since i know all this already. it’s about handling LONG breakbeats in production. slicing the LONG breakbeats is not an option, because it would create way too much instruments/samples.

i don’t understand you. why should i not be using a funk break if i actually want to, and instead be using something totally different (my own drums? are you serious? that’s something totally different). sorry but your post is not helpful.

17

You can chop your long breakbeat into shorter fractions. So instead of one long break you’ll have 4 short ones which will give you more 09xx resolution.
And anyway what’s so special about a long breakbeat? I believe it’s mostly reapeating. So a short break should be sufficient enough to work with to create your own break variations in the pattern editor.

For the “playback selected area” question: do mean in the pattern editor or in the sample editor?

18

yes i know that =)

well maybe you don’t know enough breaks then :P i have breaks which are very long and vary a lot. personally i don’t want to produce much 4 or 8 bar loops beats, but having a full resolution of the breaks to vary the beats a lot.

pattern editor. maybe if people agree with me to have this featured (which would be very nice!!) then i could post this in the Suggestions section.

19

Something similar to this suggestion?

20

don’t worry too much about people agreeing. just post it in Ideas/Suggestions if you believe it will be a valuable addition to Renoise.